


Grayling

by Transistance



Series: Butterflies [7]
Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Future Fic, Post-War, Reflection, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 07:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7608544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>William is promoted, removing him from the Collections office. It's only a difference of three floors - but given the proximity that he and Grell are used to, it seems a lot more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grayling

The office is not quite silent. The strain of the last few years has knocked the place into a soft, hanging gloom, which muffles conversations and subdues the energy of its inhabitants. Nonetheless life is beginning to return even as darkest winter sets in; although there are still droves of paperwork and half of the staff are still scattered on the continent, the war is over. The killing has stopped, the mortals are trying to piece together their shattered continents, and the reapers can finally rest.

It's _over_.

The repercussions will stretch years – William knows that. He is also aware that they will explode out again, in a far worse spate of killings, only twenty years from now. But that's tomorrow's problem, so to speak. Right now everything is still, and he has time to breathe again.

Grell makes a sudden disconsolate noise, startling him a little. The source of her displeasure is that he has slowed, attention having drifted to more ethereal things than her body. His hands rest lax on her waist and her head still tucked under his jaw, so he simply murmurs an apology and bends slightly to kiss the crown of her head. This is enough to make her hum, and continue pressing her lashes to his throat – infinitesimally delicate, she traces the line of his trachea; soothes the still raw skin. It hasn't yet been a week since she arrived back in the office. Her company is everything that he has ever wanted and then some; it has been four very long years without her. Now that she's back he finds that he doesn't want to let her go, not ever, selfish and unattainable though that goal is.

But they've had more than a hundred years now, and nothing lasts forever. Not wars, not lives and certainly not work stabilities. The war has changed things, all too fast, and everything must differ in reflection of this alteration. That he should lose her stability so soon after regaining it seems bitterly unfair, even to him. It's irrational, impersonal and uncomfortable, but he's fully aware that there's no way around it. 

Eventually she recognises his distraction and pulls back to meet his eyes, her gaze a little fuzzy without her glasses. “What's wrong, Will? You're somewhere else.”

“I've been offered a promotion.” This is not entirely true. Reapers are not offered promotions: they're given them, carefully worded so that there _is_ margin to pretend that it's a choice. 

Grell raises her eyebrows. “To what position?”

“The one directly above this – Upper Management, overseeing English branch heads.”

“So you won't be here?”

“I won't be in this office. I'll still be in this dispatch – seventh floor, I think.”

Grell frowns at him in a rather affronted way, as though annoyed that this change was not cleared with her before being implemented. “I'll not be able to see you.”

“Not during work hours, no.”

“But we've only just been reunited... Ah, tragedy engulfs us anew. You'll just have to come and visit me more often.” She says it decisively, like it doesn't mean anything – she's always been good at masking fear, but he's always been able to read her. Grell shakes her head, presses her face against his neck and simply holds him for the rest of the shift. He strokes her hair, attempting comfort, but can find no condolences to give.

William moves office at the turn of the week. 

His new sector is strange, and full of familiar strangers – he recognises himself in their narcotised eyes, their brisk gaits, their plain suits. The atmosphere is nothing like Collections; the men (and they are all men) very rarely talk to one another, and don't seem to leave their individual offices rooms except to move papers or take short, fugitive breaks. Sometimes two or three will convene over coffee and make idle conversation about the weather or the long-distance failings of their unseen subordinates, and then drift apart at no obvious cue. Few of them remember to leave when they're supposed to, and after a very short time William can plot the correlation between those who go home and those who arrive again the next day with drooping heads and puffy eyes and force themselves to scrawl out form after form, trying to dig themselves out of their addictions by merit of baseless, mindless diligence. There's no-one directly overseeing them, nobody to regulate their activities or curtail bad habits. Nobody requires them to do anything – so they work, near tirelessly.

One man latches onto William, his weary hesitance decrying his isolation. He has faded blonde hair, fading green eyes and the decaying face of a teenager, alongside an unfortunate habit of lowering his voice as he speaks. The first thing he says after introducing himself – “McPhail” - is “You're lucky to be here, y'know. Most people take years and years to get here. But then, I suppose very few of us came from Collections. Guess you must've been pretty good a worker.”

(“How old are you?” William asks him a few days later, and McPhail smiles very dolefully before murmuring the answer.

“Seven hundred and five.”)

“There was an opening,” William explains. “I was simply the most qualified to take the job.” For some reason this makes the other man snort, but before any answer is given they're interrupted by someone else.

The newcomer is short and bedraggled – or perhaps 'haggard' is the correct word. He walks with a pronounced limp and one eye is frosted over with blindness, which William hadn't even been aware was possible in reapers.

“Well – well! It's, um, William, isn't it? William T Spears? I have to say, if you'll pardon me saying so, I thought we'd be seeing you here – well – quicker, haha. Not that that's a bad thing! Not at all, not at all, I'm just saying... Well, welcome to the department.” He tries unsuccessfully to smile, mouth splitting in a way that suggests that he hasn't had the opportunity to do so in long enough that he has forgotten how to make all of the muscles in his face move correctly. William shakes his hand, expecting something else to be said, but once that's done the man turns on his heel and hobbles away. William is left standing a little bemused, and turns to McPhail for answers.

“Who was that?”

“That's Keith. He used to work in Collections until a demon got him – then he came up here.”

“Collections? I don't recall ever meeting him.”

“Oh, no, it would be before your time. And you wouldn't anyway. He was always put on suicide cases, y'know? People always used to say 'who reaps the reapers', y'know, and the answer was: Keith.”

There's something disturbing about the information. Suicides have always been handled delicately, but in recent years this has been achieved through careful delegation of the reaps to their most suited reapers on a one to one basis. That they were once all the responsibility of one person is unsettling; surely bearing witness to that much self-destruction would drive a man mad?

William watches Keith go, and they don't speak again.

The new job is much the same as the old, in some ways; paperwork is paperwork, and the cyclic nature of inboxes mean that he almost swears that he can recognise his own handwriting on some of the duller pieces. Some of the more intimate reports are missing (his subordinates are far away now, and need not be monitored and evaluated as Collections agents are) and others are more wide reaching, but really – if not for the silence on the floor he could almost forget that there has been any ascension at all. 

It is so quiet.

(There are no clocks upon the walls, he realises later. Time is not mandatory after a certain point; whilst everybody is aware to some degree that its passage is an illusion, in this white limbo its negligence screams.)

Although there's no real reason to keep himself away from Grell – indeed, there's merit in the concept of finding her company at the cusp of the first evening – William steers clear of her home for seven days, and she doesn't try to come to him. The office is very cold with only one inhabitant, and when he finds his breath steaming a cloud over his papers he realises that it is time to check the calendar. It's the first day that he packs up on time.

Her flat hasn't changed since before the war, but it still bears an air of emptiness left over from her absence. The floors are slightly too clean; there's a thin layering of dust over some of the crockery; the shelves are only half full of ornaments and objects that were at some point hastily boxed. But Grell is there, and her own changes are less obvious.

“Darling!” she cries, sheer delight lighting up her whole manner even as she throws her arms around him, crushing his arms with the strength of the embrace. “You return to me at last!”

Her reaction is irrational – they've been parted for far longer than this, over far greater distances than three floors before. “I've only been out a week.”

“And it has been the longest week of my life!” she declares, pulling him in. “How has it been? Disgustingly dull, I assume? Or is it wild parties every day? I imagine you've far more freedom to go along with far more paperwork. Here, I've got the kettle on – or would you prefer something stronger? You're looking tired.”

She fusses over him dreadfully for a time, as though she thinks herself either his mother or his spouse, asking a myriad of questions without substance about his change of scene as she cobbles together drinks without actually looking at the cups. It's rare to see her so openly distracted, and in an odd burst of clarity he realises that it might not be due to his absence, but rather the fact that he won't be returning to the way that they were.

Eventually she's forced to pause for breath, and he confesses the more acute reason that he's here _today_. “...This is an anniversary visit.” 

She frowns, for a moment. “This is nowhere near our- oh. _Oh._ ” 

“It's been thirty years,” he says softly. “And yet you still cling to her memory.”

It's the coat on her arms, left folded neatly at her desk under the note that said only _Away_ for the last four years but reclaimed now as easily as though she'd never left it. It's the measure in her gaze now, as understanding dawns. Today is not the date that Dallas died – but it is the day of the first killing, decades since Grell first laid eyes on the woman that would become her partner, in one sense of the word. He is answered with a question.

“Have you ever loved anyone?”

She doesn't bother to add _except me_ – they are both aware that that goes without saying – and although William does take the time to consider the question in full, his honest answer sits flush with the habitual. “No. I don't believe so.” Grell nods.

“It's... difficult to explain.” She puts the teacups down on the coffee table slowly, using exaggerated motions to buy time, and then takes a seat beside him on the couch. Her body's warm, absolutely welcome, and he turns to kiss her forehead half out of habit. Grell accepts the gesture with a rather lilted smile and takes one of his hands before she attempts the explanation.

“It's not about what we did – not anymore. Time heals all wounds, don't you know, and forgiveness managed somehow to creep into me when I wasn't looking. Anne betrayed me, those prostitutes betrayed their very children, but... they're gone. Long gone. There's nobody to recall those women anymore; even though my Madam had so glorious a ceremony and so statuesque a grave in comparison to those other unmarked patches of grass, everything that she was is – gone. No family to outlive her, no close friends, not after her accident; even her nephew is gone now. People will walk past her grave without any reason to suspect that she was – beautiful, passionate, intelligent, lonely and proud. I remember her as she was when we were perfect, because the closest anybody else will get is an anonymous Ripper and a weathered headstone.”

What can be said to that? They haven't spoken of the woman for years – in William's experience time is inherently destructive rather than a universal healer, but Grell's eyes are far away, her lips pinched closed. He takes both of her hands in his own, a vague and open comfort, and she leans back against him with a huffed sigh.

“We were happy, almost,” she murmurs. “Even when the adrenaline wore down and her guilt overwhelmed her. When we weren't killing we were just together; we shared loss, and grieved genuinely for one another's imparted cruelty. She was charismatic, wielding the sort of social grace that only a woman who works with the dying possesses. And her body felt right next to mine-”

“You never slept together.” He doesn't mean to say it, but it comes out anyway, barbed and cruel. Grell gives him a long, hard look.

“...No,” she confirms. “We never slept together. But we made love nonetheless; forged it between ourselves by merit of our need for one another. I _loved_ her, William, adored her, and for a time she was everything.” There's a pause in which she frowns, and then catches his eye again. “She eclipsed you completely. Can you forgive me for that?”

“You know that I already have.” It's a long time ago now, but he can still remember the reconciliation process after the killing spree. It had been badly handled and shaky, entirely uncertain that any conclusion could be reached, but by the end of it they had been together again. They'd slept together – the first time that either of them had used sex for so convoluted a purpose, as far as he knows – and in the days after that they had spoken to one another properly for the first time since the incident. A long train journey had had its uses after all; after one or two false starts he had laid himself bare before her, poured a heart's weight of shame and frustration into words that had been intended for no other listener than his own head. He'd explained as well as he could the acute distress of her sudden absence, the absolute finality of finding her playing with lives, but far more notably the fear, horror, writing disquiet that her murder of Dallas had bestowed upon him. He'd explained the attempts to sever his own emotions at the neck during her probation and return; his inability to reconcile the woman that he loved with the monster apparent on the streets of Whitechapel. In return she had taken to her own frustrations with intent, cutting through issue after issue – her growing unhappiness with his lack of understanding of her gender and dreams, the need for a kind stranger rather than a too close lover, the fierce, pounding joy of bloodletting, murder, potent enough to scare her and locked away in silent secrecy which only made it ferment; then the unexpected whiplash caused by his cruelty, _unforgivable_ reflection of her own violence through his hands, having to look at his dead eyes and wonder if he had dehumanised her as deeply as he had managed to dehumanise himself. The growing worry over his wellbeing with no outlet, no way of asking, no lease through which to vent her frustrations or talk things out. The fear, dreadful fear, that she had killed his feelings entirely – working through them in tandem with him to release herself again.

And it had worked.

Understanding had been reached; if not quite the depth of empathy that they had shared before, there were no more ambiguities, no more half-stale assumptions. Hate only spawns on the basis of a lack of understanding, and he could accept her tattered morality as much as she had accepted his antipathy toward her. The two were held up to the light, considered, and discarded with the knowledge that they were past. He has forgiven Grell, long ago, as equally as she has forgiven him.

“I miss you,” he murmurs, and Grell takes a sharp breath through her nose. William expects her to says something needlessly poetic, bemoan the tragedy of their misfortune, but all she manages is –

“-Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

He pulls her close against himself and she buries her face in his neck, silent and still, clutching him as though he's the only stability in her life; as though someone has crushed her wings.


End file.
